STORY ARCHIVE

Evolution of the Electric Guitar

TRANSCRIPT

Few musical instruments have had the profound impact on popular culture that the electric guitar has. From its humble and demure beginnings in the form of a lute, the guitar could only get louder! And Les Paul's game-changing electric guitar became the indisputable instrument of choice for any serious rock star. Jonica Newby meets guitar legends Mark Lizotte (aka Diesel) and Ian Moss to play with the next generation of guitar technology.

NARRATIONWho hasn't dreamt of being a rock god ... and for that you need one of these.

NARRATIONEven if we can't play, we can all play a mean air guitar - yet who plays air piano? It's astonishing, really, how in just a century this instrument took over music. So I've recruited some actual guitar gods. To help explain the game changing leaps of technology that got us here.

Dr Jonica NewbyAnd you won't believe where the guitar is going next.

Chapter 1: the amplified acoustic guitar

NARRATIONOnce upon a time, the humble Chordophone, ancestor to the guitar, was vying for our attention with all the other instruments. But at some point, someone went on a quest to make the Chordophone loud.

Dr Jonica NewbyBut there was a barrier - which I've asked my humble stunt rock god assistant Diesel to help demonstrate. Okay what do I do?

DieselWell I'm going to hit a chord.

Dr Jonica NewbyYep.

DieselYou're going to hit record there.

NARRATIONHere's what happens when you put a microphone in front of a guitar. Sound is air vibrating - the strings vibrate the guitar and the sound is picked up by the microphone - so far so good.But as we turn the volume up, the air from the speaker is also vibrating, eventually powerfully enough to hit the guitar. The extra vibration is then picked up by the mike, which sends it to the speaker, which loops it back to the guitar ...

Dr Jonica NewbyYou can really see the wave form.

NARRATION... and you've got feedback, the arch enemy of the acoustic guitar.

Dr Jonica NewbySo how big a venue can you play with just this set up a guitar and a microphone.

DieselI mean any size but everyone would have to be completely and utterly silent. .

Charles KamanWell for years the whole problem in helicopters is to make them not shake. The guitar, to make it good must shake. So you do the opposite.

Dr Jonica NewbyThis was his inspiration. It's piece of quartz also known as a piezoelectric crystal. What that means is that when it vibrates, it generates a tiny voltage. It's used in helicopter design to detect and eliminate vibration.

NARRATIONBut Kaman had the genius to pop them in a pickup inside the guitar. The crystals just pick up the vibrating strings not so much outside air. Which means now instead just playing to hundreds, you could play to thousands. That was the amplified acoustic guitar. But meanwhile another guitar had been quietly developing .. and it would blast the acoustic out of the arena.

Chapter 2: the electric guitar

Ian MossI was about fourteen or fifteen when I got my first electric guitar. School work went down the toilet.

Diesel:It's sort of like when someone's shown you how to strike a match for a pyromaniac.

Ian MossYeah.

NARRATIONThis is the invention that transformed 20th century music. Now the guitar was as loud as the singer - and the guitar god was born.

Ian MossThey're a buzz if you can get into a stadium. Generally you have a massive sound system, and everything's turned up to eleven and it's bliss.

NARRATIONAnd this guitar uses a completely different system. Now it's time for a bit of healthy deconstruction.

Patrick EvansYeah we've got an electric guitar. We can cover one of the pickups with this screen. So we're going to grab some carefully crafted, handcrafted iron filings.

Dr Jonica NewbyOh here we go. It is magnetic.

Patrick EvansIt is magnetic.

NARRATIONThe strings are steel, so their vibration disrupts the magnetic field, which creates electricity .. which is fed to the amp.. then speaker where the process is reversed to produce vibration - sound. With a magnetic pickup, you don't need a hollow guitar - just a lump of wood - so it's more resistant to out of control vibration from feedback. Which means ...

Patrick EvansIt takes a lot more volume to get a plank of wood to resonate to the point where it's creating trouble rather than a hollow box.

NARRATIONThat's why you can turn it up to 11! Get close enough to the speaker though and you can still get some feedback through the pickup itself.

DieselWhen they first started plugging guitars in, the feedback was technically wrong, you know on radio, they thought it was rousing, it was you know sinful, or whatever they just thought it was, just wrong and they banned it.

NARRATIONBut then, people started to like it

Ian MossThe feedback is, a lot of fun because you can play with it. It might give you an octave above or two octaves above the note you're actually hitting. And if you grab your tremolo arm and give it a bit of a wiggle, it might produce some other sort of weird harmonic or nuance - could sound like anything from a cat being strangled to, to almost cello like.

NARRATIONIt's the sound that still dominates today.

Chapter 3: A louder acoustic guitar

NARRATIONBut meanwhile Diesel was upset. He'd gone from being an electric guitar player in the 90's to playing more acoustic, but he had a problem with the volume.

DieselI knew there was more and I, knew that I could get more level, and so not be - hang on guys I'm playing an acoustic sorry.

NARRATIONEnter this man - a professional guitar maker - whose hobby is - making little guitars.

Mark MalmborgBarnsey bought a couple, gave one to Diesel and he loved it and got in touch with me. He wanted a pickup put in them

DieselMy whole idea was that I would be able to get it louder because there wasn't so much body capturing all the feedback.

NARRATIONIt's all do with the so called Fundamental Frequency - the frequency at which a whole object vibrates. The higher the fundamental frequency, the louder you can turn up the speakers before you get feedback.A regular hollow acoustic has a fundamental frequency of 120Hz. But Mark's little guitar has a fundamental frequency of 140 Hz. So thanks to Diesels understanding of the physics, they invented an acoustic guitar you can turn up 30% louder!

Mark MalmborgAnd then a lot of people were chasing them up because they'd seen Diesel playing them, so they got to be too many orders for me in the shed so I had to bring them into Maton to build them.

NARRATIONAnd now it's everywhere - even if it does prompt the odd comment

Diesel'Nice Ukulele' or 'Oh look he's got an Woody from Toy Story's guitar' I'm comfortable with my manhood, what can I say.

Chapter 4: The Future: Gizmometry!

NARRATIONThat was the 90s. But the next game changer is arriving now.

Dr Jonica NewbyIt's the Firebird X - but I prefer to call it Robo-guitar.

NARRATIONIt has automatic tuning, amongst other high tech gizmometry - and this is the first one in Australia.

Simon OlsenYou just do this, strum and it tunes it

DieselLearning already.

NARRATIONRoboguitar is Bluetooth enabled so you can go cordless, and has unlimited programmable effects built in.

Simon OlsenOh that's a reverse echo which is really cool.

NARRATIONI think I detect guitar god endorphins.

Simon OlsenIt's like a blast from the future

DieselYeah I think you'd, you'd be locking yourself away if you got one of these.

Simon OlsenFor a while huh

DieselIt's like people wouldn't hear from me...

Simon OlsenYeah, yeah.

Diesel...for months.

NARRATIONAnd all this from the humble lute.

Ian MossWhy the guitar ended up dominating the twentieth century? I don't know. I suppose it's - you can look a whole lot sexier playing it than you would say, a harp.

YOUR COMMENTS

Comments for this story are closed. No new comments can be added.

Anthony Field - 05 Oct 2011 10:38:46pm

Hi there :-)Just thought I would make a correction if anyone at all is remotely interested.

The lute is not a relative of the classical guitar, they may have a common ancestor from ancient times (ie the kithara - Greece or lyre/harp etc from Egypt) but at a certain point they became very separate historically and developed their own very different places in society and culture. Today the line dividing lute-playing tradition and guitar-playing tradition is still very clear (although guitar repertoire borrows from lute repertoire).

The guitar, through the ages has always been thought of as the rather 'folky' cousin of the lute. Lute playing has always signified nobility and chivalry in medieval/renaissance times. Unlike the guitar which has mostly been considered the raucous 'strummer' and the instrument of the unsophisticated and still is today to some extent. There you go.....I bet you never knew that.cheers :-)Antony FieldHead of Guitar University of Melbourne

steve - 17 Sep 2011 9:16:04am

It's good to see guitar still brings out peoples passion and it is nice to get an angle that itn't something akin to trainspotting.

Glensully - 16 Sep 2011 5:04:14pm

I watch Catalyst all the time and this story was closest to my heart. The auto tuning guitar is a very big step forward. I never dreamed this would be done, keeps the innovation & science in music alive.

Rel - 16 Sep 2011 11:50:06am

I think the ABC is becoming the American musical industries promotional vehicle.

Science? Music? Evolution of the guitar? Give us a break ABC!

"It's the Firebird X - but I prefer to call it Robo-guitar."

This program was a pitch for the Gibson guitar company. It is well known around the industry that Gibson's 'robo' guitar was a functional and marketing flop.

There is nothing 'new' about this concept, other than putting a whole lot of existing technology into a guitar body. Is that evolution or is it new packaging?

I wonder what demographic the ABC is now targeting?

Ralph - 15 Sep 2011 8:49:40pm

In addition to the tiresomely inevitable shots of Newby in front of a computer exclaiming "Gosh, you can really see it!" her explanations of electric guitar are deplorable. Where to begin? First, her explanation of feedback is garbled, holding a quartz crystal up to a helicopter rotor is ridiculous, and when she moves to solid body guitars the footage shows players playing hollow semi-acoustics. The story seems to be about promoting self-tuning guitars (wow! what a revolution! just what every guitarist needs! it's so difficult to tune a guitar!). Ian Moss (for Newby, a "guitar god"!) ignorantly reckons that the guitar's 20th century popularity is because it makes the player "look sexy"! It is small and portable, and one of the very few instruments that can accompany itself (most others play only single notes at a time - not chords), and became amplified to be heard with drums and brass in early rhythm'n'blues, where bands needed to be loud for dancing purposes. The Spanish brought it into the US south. I could go on, but encourage others to do their own basic research, which Newby clearly neglected to do.